Privatizing the production of settler colonial landscapes: ‘Authenticity’ and imaginative geography in Wadi Al-Salib,Haifa

Abstract

This article explores how urban settler-colonial landscapes are produced in the neoliberal era. Adopting an anti-colonial approach, the article addresses practices of landscape production through the history of Wadi Al-Salib in Haifa after the driving out of its inhabitants in 1948. A micro geographical study of three Palestinian refugees’ houses, sold by the state to private real estate companies during the last two decades, constitutes the empirical mainstay of the article. Located in Wadi Al-Salib where rapid neoliberal urban renewal schemes hope to raise property values and enact demographic change, these houses are often marketed to upper-class Israeli Jews as “authentic”. Such branding indicates that the privatization of the Palestinian refugees' houses may also signify privatization of the colonial imagination, and a broader shift of the landscape into a collage of marketable images, echoing an ‘aesthetic violence’ that evokes past colonial landscapes. Such references create several hyper-realities in the same place, thus canonizing colonial landscapes’ imaginaries.

Keywords

Landscape settler-colonialism neoliberalism urban renewal Palestine/Israel geographical imagination Haifa

Introduction

Various insights into the role space plays in societies’ developments led scholars to consider different spatial forms – such as landscapes, ruins, and cities – as integral parts of dynamic economic, socio-political and temporal processes, rather than static testimonies or reflections of power relations (Delaney, 2008; Mitchell, 2002; Stoler, 2016). In settler-colonial settings, space is considered both a territory to be seized and an instrument of violence to be wielded against indigenous populations (Razack, 2011). This is accomplished through spatial-temporal practices such as segregation, siege, exile, demolition of built heritage or, alternatively, its preservation in a ‘pasteurized’ form, bereft of its native history.

In the context of Palestine, although most demolition and/or preservation of Palestinian habitats took place in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Zionist movement persists in carrying them out, often under the guise of global discourses (Fenster, 2012; Salamanca, 2016). Thus, while the demolition of a Palestinian historical urban neighborhood might be depicted as ‘creative destruction’, it could equally be preserved in the name of its ‘authentic’ value, inasmuch as ‘authenticity’ represents value in neoliberal discourses (Zukin, 2010). These two alternatives, both of which construe indigenous space as modern archaic or authentic, have in common the developer’s gaze, namely the imperative to replace or otherwise embellish the native landscape. While in some cases, the fate of Palestinian villages and neighborhoods was determined soon after the Nakba (the 1948 war), in others it was put on hold. One such indigenous place-in-waiting is Wadi Al-Salib [ ],¹ the focus of the present paper. Processes currently unfolding in Wadi Al-Salib, I argue, are indicative of the ways in which neoliberalism mutates settler colonialism into new forms. The natives’ elimination is largely done through the market and is carried out by real-estate companies, financial institutions, architecture firms etc. In order to examine this cross-breeding between settler colonialism and neoliberalism, I shall probe into the ‘new’ physical landscape produced as well as the imaginative basis and frame of reference used.

Recent urban renewal plans for Wadi Al-Salib stipulated not only the construction of new buildings and public facilities, but also a new image for the neighborhood. In promoting an environment that is at once ‘modern’ and ‘authentic’ this new project draws upon the neighborhood history and references other Israeli ‘authentic places’, but remains careful not to mention the neighborhood’s Palestinian past or the violent way in which it ended. Such representations and references raise questions regarding the meaning and magnitude of the temporal-spatial characteristics used in the planning and marketing of urban renewed spaces, especially in light of the use of neoliberal logics to advocate the ‘privatization’ of confiscated Palestinian refugees’ houses sold by government agencies to the private sector. Following Said’s (1989) argument on how colonialism cannot be conceived ‘without important philosophical and imaginative processes at work in the production as well as the acquisition, subordination, and settlement of space’ (p. 218), not only the new physical landscape it produces is in question here. Its imaginative basis and frame of reference are central to an understanding of how neoliberalism transforms settler colonialism into new forms. Yet, while in Said’s discussion of colonialism’s imaginative geography embodies the notion of ‘othering’, in settler colonial societies, it has further complications which will be discussed later. Hence, this article aims to contribute to several interlinked objectives: to explore the production of colonial landscape in the neoliberal era, to problematize the political imagination involved in this process and to discuss its inherent temporal representations. Referring to other cases of Israeli landscape production implemented on Palestinian spaces will help clarify the context in which the planning, branding and marketing of a refurbished Wadi Al-Salib is taking place. The proposed methodology to achieve this goal is two-pronged: a macro overview of urban plans and marketing campaigns on the one hand, and a micro-geographical study into three particular houses on the other.

Landscape performances in a settler colonial society

The dynamic nature of settler colonialism gives it an adaptability that allows it, for instance, to adopt elements from contemporary discourses and legal strategies and work through them. Settler colonial regimes sometimes render the dynamic of colonization almost invisible through seemingly innocuous language and practices (Stoler, 2016), especially when the settler-colonial dynamic unfolds in cities where it is mediated through a language of grappling with global issues such as immigration and urban planning (Porter and Yiftachel, 2019). In this respect, Coulthard (2014) emphasized how, through gentrification, indigenous spaces in the city become once again a ‘frontier’ for dispossession and are treated as urbs nullius – ‘urban space[s] void of indigenous sovereign presence’ (p. 484). The incompatibility between these new neoliberal formations and the analytically obtuse language used to describe them stresses the need to revisit the process of generation of space today, in relation to dispossession and settlement. This has been done lately through analyses of new forms of landownership and hitherto underexplored ‘performances’ of property within the neoliberal processes of privatization and gentrification in settler colonial societies (Ben-Arie and Fenster, 2020; Blatman-Thomas and Porter, 2019; Blomley, 2004; Clarno, 2017; Fenster, 2019; Yacobi and Tzfadia, 2019). Concepts as property and land are generated under conditions that necessitate their ‘divestment and alienation’ from their original owners (Nichols, 2018: 5), hence they are not only a way to maintain ‘settler dominance over dispossessed land,’ but as Blatman-Thomas and Porter (2019) argue, they also ‘surface the entrenched antagonistic relations intrinsic to settler-colonial relations of power’ (p. 42).

Following these notions on property, race and settler colonialism, another form of space – the landscape – will be examined in this article. Although the landscape is typically at the forefront of settler-colonial mindsets during the early stages of colonization, serving, for example, as an ‘aesthetic alibi’ for conquest (Mitchell, 2000), a central site in which the myth of terra nullis was perpetuated, and a textual presence familiar to the colonizer (Gregory, 1994: 168–172), it dissipates in later stages. Under the recent neoliberal turn, for instance, notions of landscape began suffusing a different imaginative geography, appearing as ‘creative destruction’ (Harvey, 2012), ‘authentic neighborhoods’ (Zukin, 2010), preservation trends such as façade retentions (Richards, 1994) and even as a commodity in a novel form of high-end consumerism (Boyer, 1992). In the case of intersection between neoliberalism and settler colonialism, landscape’s imaginary becomes more complicated. Hence, while such neoliberal phenomena constitute channels by which to understand how landscapes are being repurposed in the new accumulation regime, we must be wary of their capacity to obfuscate our understanding of colonization from a diagnosable historical process of elimination into misrepresentations of settler colonial cities as urban spaces undergoing processes that are merely variations of practices transforming capitalist cities everywhere. On top of that, landscapes are also a kind of public sphere, one able to preserve and inscribe a distinct collective identity and a unique time perspective onto space. It translates dominance over the land into the experience of hearing, seeing and feeling it, conveying the collective imaginative complement of the materialistic object, namely the Poetics of Space and Time in Bachelard’s (2014) terms. Hence, this article aims to expand the understanding of ‘imaginative geography’ (Phillips 1997: 12; Said, 1985: 54–55) of landscapes today, transfigured by state dispossession, and later, by the unbound forces of a privatized, deregulated market which unleash urban renewal and other neoliberal policies with the aim of ultimately maintaining settler control.

The constitution of colonial landscapes in Israel

The changes in the physical and imaginative geographical aspects are easily discernible in the case of the occupied historical land of Palestine, in both its rural and its urban landscapes. First, rural Palestine was altered dramatically with the destruction en masse of hundreds of villages in the months and years following the 1948 war – the Nakba, and the forestation projects led by the Jewish National fund (Kadman, 2015; Falah, 1999). Israeli planners have likewise been altering Palestine’s cityscapes, transforming unfamiliar territories to ‘the eyes of Israeli Jews’ into a ‘familiar home ground’, as Weizman (2007) argued about the case of Jerusalem (pp. 25–28). To Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2016), this process takes place through technologies that manage sight, sound, time and space, a multisensory oppression she terms the ‘occupation of the senses’ which draws our attention to a kind of ‘aesthetic violence’ assaulting the most fundamental aspects of the daily lives of Palestinians today.

The changes in the landscape caused by these technologies go beyond the developer’s gaze towards the creation of colonial poetics and myths of space and time. Thus, in the case of the Palestinian villages, it goes beyond mere physical destruction and into the realm of creating myths about the Palestinian landscape. In this respect, Falah (1999), having surveyed 418 Palestinian demolished villages, wrote exasperatedly: ‘[T]hey [the Israelis] destroyed most of what they found, and claimed they made the desert bloom’ (p. 105). As for Palestinian townscapes, Hasan (2019) argued that Israel is demonstrably committed to systematically erasing them as a part of an attempt to misrepresent the pre-1948 Palestinian society as rural and primitive, and thus rewrite history to conform to Zionist narrative. This is hardly a recent development, as pre-1948 Zionist planning and development has often pointed to its own modernity as justification enough for Jewish political supremacy (Fenster, 2012; Salamanca, 2016). In Haifa, for example, the Jewish Agency created the ‘Haifa Committee’ in 1937 to influence the Woodhead commission and challenge the Peel Commission’s recommendation that Palestine be partitioned and Haifa made an international city. The Haifa Committee advocated, for instance, a plan that dictated the purchase and the demolition of ‘the problematic quarters’ Wadi Al-Salib and parts of the Old City due to their ‘primitive planning’ (Weiss, 2011: 113–114). The proposed plan would not, however, resettle Palestinian residents to their neighborhoods after the completion of the supposedly urgent urban renewal projects. After all, these were central parts of Haifa, they reasoned. Palestinians would never be equal to the task of properly maintaining and developing it (Weiss, 2011). Although the plans of the ‘Haifa Committee’ were never adopted by the British, only two months after the 1948 war, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister and minister of defense issued an order to demolish Old Haifa (Margalit, 2014: 232). A few decades later, the vast modernist governmental buildings built on its remains, including the district courts building, loom large above the few Palestinian houses that were spared. These acts qualify as ‘urbicide’ and ‘erascape’ of the major Palestinian city, i.e. the demolishing of an existing Palestinian landscape and replacing it by an essentially colonial spatial order, knowledge, and identity (Ben-Arie, 2016: 186; Kolodney & Kallus, 2008: 332). Similarly, to what happened in Jaffa, Tiberias, Lydda and Ramla and other Palestinian urban cities (Hasan, 2019; Paz, 1998).

While the sheer scope of the demolitions that ravaged Old Haifa once it was conquered are buried underground, Wadi Al-Salib is a veritable archeological site of historical violence standing above the surface. In this respect, Wadi Al-Salib is a vestige of Palestinian Haifa that survives to this day. However, along the years, buildings that survived demolitions became the focus of some Israeli politicians and architects who proposed incorporating Palestinian heritage into a new landscape, an urban ‘fusion’ that would match the ‘new order’ (e.g., Kolodney & Kallus, 2008; Margalit, 2014). These attitudes, as it will be shown in the following examples, rejected physical demolition as the principle activity of urbicide, and sought to eliminate only the Palestinian history of these buildings through an extensive recontextualization effort. One example is the attitude of Marcel Janco, an artist credited with bringing Dada art movement to Israel, who was an animating figure in the conservation of the Palestinian village of Ayn Hawd () and part of Old Jaffa, to Jewish artists’ spaces.² His imaginative perspective, can be best grasped through the following statement he made regarding his ‘discovery’ of Ein Hod in 1953:

I witnessed the demolition of numerous houses. When I inquired, I was told that the army demolished houses in the abandoned village for security reasons… Being an architect and an artist, I could see that this was not an ordinary Arab village, but a historical one… And indeed, Roman ruins were discovered there, and probably many other archeological remains are yet to be found.³

Another example, is the attitude of the architect Ilan Pivko, a self-described ‘poet of space and a creator of emotions’ (Monterescu, 2015: 146–147). He is widely regarded as a pioneering figure in the neoliberal turn in Israeli real estate in the 1980s when Palestinian refugees’ houses were converted into ‘authentic’, read expensive, real-estate properties. Pivko’s self-description is intriguing in that it explicitly alludes to Bachelard’s (2014) definition of the ‘poetics of space’ as involving the feelings and memories that generate the meaning of a place. In the colonial context, the poetics of space are used to project an ‘imaginative geography’ of the Other onto the landscape (Said, 1985: 54–55). His geographical imagination can be gleaned from the following statement he made:

For me, living in Jaffa is to live in Tel-Aviv with roots… When I first bought my house, it had nothing special. It had to be rebuilt while preserving the spirit of the district, an Italian spirit… I feel that what has always guided my reflection is a will to create harmony out of concepts that have been too often received as opposing: past, present, future, and various cultures… In Jaffa, there were simple things without luxury or beauty. It is perhaps here that I became an architect.⁴

Janco and Pivko worked through different planning policies and economic discourses. While the first’s work was carried out in the 1950s (e.g., Ein Hod and Old Jaffa) and was led by governmental committees (Paz, 1998), the second’s work in the 1980s was implemented primarily through the neoliberal playbook, including privatizing the planning process and stoking a market-fueled gentrification of the neighborhoods, as happened in Al-A’jami district of Jaffa. Nevertheless, both depict themselves as uniquely capable of ‘discovering’ the place, discerning its beauty and intervening in time to preserve it from the clutches of demolition or continued neglect. In that sense, these narratives echo conventional colonial stories which cast white settlers as the bearers of a civilized appreciation of a pre-modern indigenous environment unappreciated by the natives themselves (Razack, 2002: 3). Both Janco and Pivko’s attraction, moreover, is to the place’s ostensible links to non-Arab Mediterranean cultures, to ‘Roman ruins’ or to ‘Italian spirit’. These attempts at de-Arabizing the space can be seen in both official websites of Ein Hod and ‘Hatsedef house’ (lit. ‘the Shell house’, heb. ‘בית הצדף’, Pivko’s project in Al-A’jami, Jaffa). The projects are described as part of an Israeli culture and landscape; ‘Hatsedef house’ is lauded as ‘a landmark in Israeli architecture’ while Ein Hod is described in connection to ‘ancient Israel’.⁵ Evidently, in both cases, a Mediterranean discourse blurs the fact that they are Palestinian buildings (LeVine, 2005: 227; Slyomovics, 2014). The relevance of these cases to Wadi Al-Salib steams not only from their ability to provide a historical context to the Israeli production of colonial landscape, but mainly for the geographical imaginary they produced and which municipality planners and current marketing campaigns have adopted.

In other similar cases, scholars described the discourse revolving around Palestinian heritage as orientalist, a ‘romantic mystification of a seemingly timeless Arab material culture’ (Margalit, 2014:234). Yacobi (2008: 114) goes further, arguing that in such places: ‘the Palestinian landscape is a subject of mimicry through which symbolic indigenization of the settlers takes place’. On this regard, Slyomovics (2014) emphasizes an additional set of ideologies, which is not limited to the description of the imagined Oriental ‘other’ – which not only engenders a ‘symbolic indigenization’ on the settler’s behalf but also seeks to replace it. She argues that Janco promotes the myth of natural occupancy through appropriating a ‘sense of nativeness’ for the settlers. In this respect, Wolfe (2006: 389) argues:

[T]he erasure of indigeneity conflicts with the assertion of settler nationalism. On the one hand, settler society required the practical elimination of the natives in order to establish itself on their territory. On the symbolic level, however, settler society subsequently sought to recuperate indigeneity in order to express its difference—and, accordingly, its independence—from the mother country…

[S]ettler colonialism does not simply replace native society tout court. Rather, the process of replacement maintains the refractory imprint of the native counter-claim.

The simultaneity of the settlers’ need for a feeling of indigeneity and the elimination of the native is embodied in how Palestinian refugees’ heritage is marketed as ‘authentic’ in Israeli hegemonic discourses, but is carefully inoculated of their past. It is also a ‘refractory imprint’ of the Palestinian claim of the land. Hence, authenticity has become in the neoliberal era an elusive and illusionary marketing label of a particular past and is employed for financial gain (Boyer, 1992; Zukin, 2010) and on the top of that in settler colonial settings it is used to endow settlers with a sense of indigeneity. This discussion would help in tracing the settler-colonial imaginative geography development under neoliberal planning policies in the following sections.

Methodology: The archaeology of the address

This article is part of ‘The Address Project’, in which a methodology called ‘the archaeology of the address’ is employed (Ben-Arie and Fenster, 2020; Fenster, 2014, 2019). It is an intensive micro-geographic research, drawing on municipal archival records, planning data, and official maps to expose what Fenster (2014) called the ‘cracks’ of knowledge inherent in them, providing access to data that would otherwise remain concealed. For example, by investigating the pre-1948 history of a particular building and tracing the name of its Palestinian owner, such data allows us to reexamine the temporal basis of the colonial geographic imagination and challenge its representation as an a-historical representation of vernacular architecture.

The main sources of primary materials in this research are planning department archives, city archives, the Abba Hushi (the mayor of Haifa from 1951 to 1969) archive, preservation reports, British Mandate’s maps, urban plans of the district, current media sources, refugees’ memories, field research and photographic documentation by Palestinians. The micro-geographical research focuses on three buildings in Wadi Al-Salib neighborhood, slated for preservation: “48–50 Stanton street”, “Irbid 3”, “Al-Burj 15” (see Figure 1). These buildings were selected because they exemplify dominant approaches in preservation work, as it is currently being implemented by numerous real-estate companies on a large scale. All three are included in the 1986 outline plan for the area of ‘the artists’ quarter’. Renovation works, which allow a glimpse into the process and the ‘archeological’ layers being added/destroyed as part of the “final” landscape, are still underway in all three locations.

Figure 1.

Satellite images of a part of Haifa. The one on the right was taken in 1945 (it retrieved from the Micha Granit Maps Library at the Department of Geography, Tel Aviv University), and the one on the left was taken in 2015 (it retrieved from the GIS program). In light green is “48–50 Stanton street”, in blue is “Irbid 3” and in yellow “Al-Burj 15”.

The material collected from the abovementioned sources were put together thus creating a portfolio for each building relating to its physical and social transformations. These portfolios helped in identifying and exploring the multitude of perspectives through which each building has been viewed, such as the technical data and the jargon used by the planning department, the social life of the dwellers and the building’s marketing strategies.

Archeology of addresses in Wadi Al-Salib

Wadi Al-Salib was established in the mid nineteenth century outside the eastern gate of the historical city of Haifa by Ottoman-Arab govenor Dahir Al-Omar (Seikaly, 2002). The neighborhood expanded rapidly in the early twentieth century following the opening of the Al-Hijaz railway station in 1905 (Mansour, 2006), and, later, when the new port was built by the British in 1933 (Seikaly, 2002). By the 1940s, Wadi Al-Salib was the largest Arab neighborhood in Haifa, sprawling over some 170 dunams and home to over five thousand inhabitants, many of them immigrating from the numerous hamlets surrounding Haifa (Goren, 2009: 162). The neighborhood’s rich and diverse social tapestry and political history are inscribed into its physical ruins as well recorded in memoirs of its Palestinian inhabitants, such as those of two students of Al-Burj school, Abed El-Latef Kanafani and Ehssan A’bbas.⁶ Contemporary sources testify to the vibrant social and cultural life of the neighborhood, which was home to several printing houses,⁷ a children care association,⁸ bars and coffee shops,⁹ political and social meetings for women,¹⁰ and where national forums and religious events were held. Wadi Al-Salib was also where some leading national Palestinian figures lived and worked, such as the leader of 1936 anti-British revolt, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam¹¹ and Haifa’s mayor during the 1920s, Abd al-Rahman al-Haj.¹² In the 1930s, the lower parts of the sloped neighborhood became overcrowded and impoverished as a result of municipal negligence, which ‘was seen as intending not only to deprive the old quarter of improvements but also to divest of already established services’ to the Jewish neighborhoods (Seikaly, 2002: 222). The British Mandate eventually classified part the neighborhood as ‘reconstruction area’ (plan no. 363 and 248, 1938). The Jewish agency sought to capitalize on the dilapidated state of Wadi Al-Salib, describing it as a ‘slum’ and ‘a sanctuary for criminals’, and advocating its wholesale destruction and subsumption into the envisioned Jewish state (Weiss, 2011:113–114), which, according to Herzl's book Altneuland (1902), would remake Haifa as a modern, clean metropolis, a Jewish port city in the mold of the modern urban centers of Europe.

During the 1948 war, like the other Arab neighborhoods of the city, Wadi Al-Salib was emptied of the vast majority of its Palestinian residents,¹³ their houses classified by the newly founded Israeli government as ‘abandoned property’ and transferred them to the care (in a move that extended effective ownership) of an Israeli body named ‘The Custodian of Absentees’ Property’.¹⁴ In a second step taken the early 1950s, the properties were transferred to the governmental Development Authority (also operating under the auspices of the Ministry of Finance), which was tasked with selling it to the private sector (Fischbach, 2003, Forman and Kedar, 2004).¹⁵ Within a few years, however, the neighborhood was populated, sometimes without the state’s permission, by impoverished Jewish immigrants, mainly of Mizrahi origins who had arrived from Arab countries (Weiss, 2007: 34).¹⁶ Many of them were evacuated in 1959, following a rebellion against Israel’s discriminatory practices which began in the neighborhood. Following their evacuation, calls for its demolition resurfaced, describing the place as incompatible with the ‘new’ modern city (Weiss, 2007: 126).¹⁷ On the ground, for decades, the dilapidated neighborhood appeared suspended in time, as though it were an extraterritorial space; many of the windows and doors sealed by cement; visitors kept away by “Danger! No Entry” signs. Municipal neglect and inaccessibility to large parts of the neighborhood had arguably made Wadi Al-Salib more of a ruin than a neighborhood, a deserted landscape without human activity. Remarkably, this state of affairs testified to its Palestinian past, poignantly echoing the Palestinian refugees’ memoirs and referenced in awareness-raising events.

Recently adopted urban renewal plans ‘Artists’ Quarter on the margins of Wadi Salib’ (HP 1826) and ‘master planning for Wadi Al-Salib’ (HP 1601) slate some of the remaining Palestinian houses for destruction and envisage their replacement with modern megastructures and a municipal park.¹⁸ These plans are based on ‘privatizing’ the refugees’ properties, namely selling the confiscated buildings and lands to the private sector. One of the new projects is called ‘The Quarter’ (see Figure 2), tying together three detached buildings of nine floors each into one real estate project totalling almost two hundred apartments. Oddly, the park’s construction is presented by planners as a functional decision due to its capacity to inexpensively repurpose debris from the demolished houses, accentuate the valley’s natural topography and help to harmonize the modern buildings with the ‘perceived’ historical houses’ landscape. The few Palestinian refugees’ houses that the outline plan keeps are preserved, albeit that some of them deemed appropriate only for ‘façade retention’ quite literally were turned into nothing but outer shells. One of such cases is a project named ‘The Gallery’, another one is a building on which an advertisement hung on bearing Pivko’s architectural group’s logo, and declares that here is the ‘Neve Tzedek of Haifa’, referring to Pivko’s famous work in a Jewish historical neighborhood in Tel Aviv - Jaffa. In seeming unison with the real-estate marketing strategy, the city council and local media outlets took to describing the neighborhood as a mixture of authenticity and modernity, even calling the far–ranging changes real-estate developers have been carrying out in the neighborhood as a ‘face-lifting’ operation.¹⁹

Figure 2.

Some historical buildings of Wadi Al-Salib, beneath them a sign of the project; reads ‘you are the quarter'. Photography by the author.

Irbid 3: The gallery

Irbid 3 (plot 32, block 10841) is one of the buildings listed for preservation according to 1986 masterplan. The first document in the property’s file in the planning department’s archives, dated November 1954, is a reply from the Haifa city council to an Israeli resident who requested to expand his apartment. The document, “an authorization/permit for a temporary building”, includes an official certificate of approval to the resident’s request, with the stipulation that the resident ‘shall not seek compensation’ when the building will be demolished, an eventuality that the city council was sure of due to its location in ‘reconstruction areas’. While this sense of temporariness was in line with the previous generation of Haifa’s Jewish communities perceptions of Wadi Al-Salib as a ‘slum […] to be demolished’, the paper trail preserved in the file does not explain how and why the house eventually survived and what led to its eventual inclusion in the list for preservation. The most astonishing detail in the building file is the description of the building as being in a ‘moderate’ physical condition in a 6 February 2013 meeting of the Committee for Preservation. Not only is it not described as a ruin; it is rather admired for its “arch openings and unique architectural stone details” (Weiss, 2007).

This unexplained turn of events in the official papers from a ‘building for destruction’ to a ‘building for preservation’, can be better understood through the land registration database and a glimpse of the properties’ renovation and marketing. In 2012, it was purchased from the Development Authority by a private Israeli real estate developer. This new actor seems to have influenced the building’s structure and representation. In the last few years, the developer proceeded to demolish all the inner walls, leaving only the façade for preservation (see Figure 3). An entirely new building was built within, adding three floors of different style and materials. A large sign hangs on the building stating ‘The Gallery – last apartments for sale’. Another sign hung on a different side of the building tells passersby: ‘The Gallery Project – The Artists’ Quarter: The link between Past and Future’. The projects’ website does little to help clarify this advertiser’s idiom. The only time ‘the past’ is mentioned on the website continues in the same strain:

Figure 3.

The building of Irbid 3, after demolition all its inner walls and leaving only the façade. The sign reads: “The Gallery – the new trend of residence in Haifa”. The fireworks are part of Israel’s Independence Day celebration. Photography by: Mouhamad Badarni in 2017.

The rich history of the picturesque neighborhood emerges from every corner, and you can feel it when you drink cup of great cappuccino in a café or when you spend a night full of experiences and good energy in the pub near your home, or even just as you walk through the enchanting alleys and feel how each wall tells a story of many decades.

Such literally superficial preservation and presentation of a historical site may be evocative of Mitchell’s (1991) study of the European exhibitions in which façades of ‘Oriental’ structures were erected to give visitors the impression of an oriental environment. However, given the urbanization of the area, the existence of very few historical buildings and the addition of modern floors to them, historical architecture is used in the neighborhood as embellishments, aesthetic detailing rather than a constitutive element in the built environment, as in the city of Old Jaffa or the town of Ein Hod. Through The Gallery’s branding it is attempted to rewrite a historical narrative of a past. Just like in art galleries, the narrative encompassed a re-positioning of the historical landscape within certain imagined space and socio-cultural elements which are rearranged inside a frame. And yet, the marketing campaign slogan describes the vicinity as ‘the link between the past and the future’. However, the only recourse to the ‘past’ in the project’s website is the tenants’ supposed personal experience of walking in the neighborhood’s picturesque pathways while they drink cappuccino and look at the historical walls of the streets. Such romanticized descriptions represent the neoliberal rendering of authenticity as a consumer experience. In Zukin’s (2010) words: ‘a city is authentic if it can create the experience of origins’ (p. 3). Hence, it appears that the neoliberal policies of privatization not only attempt to ‘unlock the land values’ (Rolnik, 2013: 1063) of this property but also to generate a different spatial experience and representation of the place through common neoliberal discourse, while maintaining the veiled structural violence of the settler colonial regime.

While the title ‘the Gallery Project – the Artist’s Quarter’ brings to mind Janco’s rebranding of Old Jaffa and Ein Hod, as artists’ spaces, the Gallery’s developer insisted in an interview that his and similar projects throughout the neighborhood will soon become a role model for urban renewal projects across the country.²⁰

48–50 Stanton street: The ‘Neve Tzedek of Haifa’

At short distance from ‘The Gallery’, stands ‘Neve Tzedek of Haifa’. The remains of 48–50 Stanton Street from pre-1948 Haifa (plots 19,22,23, Block 10841) are little more than a ground floor facade of six arches opening unto Shevat–Zion street (the new name of Stanton street, lit. ‘return to Zion’, heb. שיבתציון). Behind the façades, a gaping empty space awaits developers. An advertisement hung on the building bears Pivko’s architectural group’s logo telling passersby that here is the ‘Neve Tzedek of Haifa’.²¹ Analogies with Nave Tzedek are often used in mainstream Israeli media to describe the changes in Wadi Al-Salib, particularly the gentrification projects. The choice to refer to a gentrified Jewish neighborhood as the developers’ model do not only indicate an attempt to steer attention away from the colonial, ‘political’ context of Wadi Al-Salib, and locate the neighborhood’s make-over within the context of an a-political, ‘purely market-driven’ reclamation of old neighborhoods by forces of urban renewal. But it also relates to the attempts to give a sense of ‘nativity’ to its historical buildings. Yet, the reference given to history does not go to Italian or Roman relics as Israeli architects did in the 1950s, but to an Israeli gentrified neighborhood. As to the actual intended plan: an illustration of the planned buildings appears alongside the inscription on the sign: modern buildings are visible from uphill streets behind the façade (see Figure 4), similarly to Irbid 3 renovations.

Figure 4.

48–50 Stanton street. The sign reads: ‘Neve Tzedek of Haifa’, sporting Pivko’s company’s logo. Photography by the author.

This addresses’ building file in the planning department’s archive and its preservation file reveal an interesting history. Although the building files did not include any document before 1948 and thus did not reveal the names of the Palestinian owners, they gave an indication of its use and structure pre 1948. Apparently, the building was part of the first line of buildings outside the walls of the historical city. It was built in the 19th century in a typical commercial Arabic architectural style. In the ‘artist’s quarter’ plans from the 1986, these buildings were slated for preservation. During the early 2000s, however, a construction company sought to build a different project on the plot. As part of the planning, the buildings were surveyed, recorded and slated for demolition, except for the now only existing stone building. Following the buildings’ demolition, a new urban outline plan was drawn up for the plots which defined new building rights, including the addition of a single story to the existing structure and the preservation of the front (Preservation file, 2015). The project, however, fell through due to financing issues and the plot remained unchanged until today. In 2014, the Development Authority leased the plots to four companies (according to the land registration registry), one of whom works with the Pivko architectural firm, to which the sign of ‘Neve Tzedek of Haifa’ belongs. The name Neve Tzedek does not have any direct connection to this project, probably except its imaginative function.

Al-Burj 15: Law offices

Unlike the two previous buildings, this one (Plot 34, Block 10841) has a well-documented history of its pre-1948 past. The building (see Figure 5) is located in Al-Burj (lit. ‘the tower’, ar. ) Street (prior to 1948) which was named after the guard tower built by Dahir Al-Omar in the same street to protect the city. Today the street has been renamed Ma'ale Ha-Shihrur (lit. ‘liberation slope’, heb. מעלה השחרו). The buildings of Al-Burj were the newest houses to be built in Wadi Al-Salib, where reputable families lived, including Abd al-Rahman al-Haj, Haifa’s mayor between 1920 and 1927.²² This specific house also features in a novel by Abed Al-Latef Kanfani, a Palestinian refugee whose family built the house and lived in it until 1948. The novel is entitled “Al-Burj 15” and narrates the domestic milieu and the Kanfani family’s routine and daily life. According to the novel, the house served as a meeting place where the author’s mother held a monthly meeting for women to discuss social and political affairs.

Figure 5.

Al-Burj 15, taken in 2019. Photography by the author.

The building file available in the City Council’s planning department includes several documents from the 1920s onwards about the owner (see Figure 6). Pre 1948 documents include permits to the Kanafani family to build a new building near the existing one. Documents from the 1950s show that the building was transferred to the Custodian of Absentee Property, after which an Israeli tenant moved in and soon requested permits to renovate the house.

Figure 6.

A document date April 1929 from the file of the house in the City Council’s planning department.

In the preservation file of this building,²³ it is described as a ‘central space house’, built of limestone with three floors, balconies on the northern front, and windows and doors crowned by pointed arches. Furthermore, the report includes an engineer’s appraisal from 2009 determining that the building was in good structural condition and an assessment that the current stone frame could support an additional floor or two. The ‘Recommendations and Guidelines for Preservation’ determined that, regarding balconies: ‘as future use stipulates their enclosure, the constructive frame must be preserved […] Glass walls are to be installed […] thus the balcony units will be preserved in the “airiest” and most “transparent” look’. The balconies were eventually enclosed with blue glass, as illustrated in Figure 5. The addition of a modern blue glass facades to seal the original balconies meant to change the building’s use into an air-conditioned offices; changes that disturb the Palestinian poetics and history of the space. Nevertheless, they are normalized by the current market’s discourse and needs.

The building is currently owned by four real estate companies. Its building file clearly shows its transformation from an organic space which had been the center of familial and communal life to a capitalist object preoccupied with “authenticity” and “comfort” for well paying customers.

Discussion

The case of Wadi Al-Salib and the detailed histories of the three addresses are a telling example that illuminates the geographical imaginative production in the settler colonial context in the neoliberal era. For almost five decades, it remained an extraterritorial enclave in the middle of the city, both physically and officially. Following the privatization of the confiscated Palestinian refugees’ houses and the urban plans of regeneration, part of the neighborhood was demolished during the last decade and turned into a recreational open space. Such elimination through demolition represents a continuation in the urbicide of the Palestinian city, a means extensively used in the adjacent quarter of the Old City of Haifa. Yet, while bare colonial justifications were made in the past, the language of the market now prevails. Moreover, while elimination was conducted by the army through the demolition of the Old City in 1948, it is done, in the last two decades, by private companies and architectural firms through demolitions and renovations at Wadi Al-Salib.

The argument made by Slyomovics (2014) and Wolfe (2006) regarding setters’ appropriation of some aspects of the native’s culture to get a sense of ‘nativity’ and in the case of Israel to adopt a “Middle Eastern” rather than a Palestinian imagination, might hold for earlier stages of dispossession. However, in the neoliberal era, not only the refugees’ properties are privatized but also the production of imagination and the sense of nativity. As the cases of the three addresses discussed above in Wadi Al-Salib shows, the marketing campaigns relied on a pool of images drawn from neoliberal discourses and Israeli-settler landscape imaginary. Paradoxically, these images are themselves ‘romantic illusions’ of the settler society regarding the space (such as artists’ quarter etc.). Therefore, whereas a discussion regarding the concepts of authenticity, façades, and preservation is appealing, I argue that pondering authenticity versus illusion is superfluous, but that one must rather examine the attempts to cancel the distinction between the two. In this regard, scholars from outside the settler colonial studies may contribute to understanding this geographical imaginary basis. For example, Baudrillard (1994) showed how simulation collapses the difference between ‘true’ and ‘false’, between ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’. Hence, unlike the imaginative basis and poetics of time-space of the colonial order, the logic of the settler colonial regimes is not built on ‘othering’, but rather on elimination, through the construction of an edifice composed of a mixture of real and imaginary: of old stones and new buildings, of dispossession and rewriting the past. This alludes to what Baudrillard (1994) termed as hyper-realities, ‘the generation by models of a real without origin or reality’.

This hyper-reality is particularly pronounced in situation where neoliberalism intersect with settler colonialism, given the expansive nature of both processes and their inbuilt logic of continual creation of new frontiers. While neoliberalism attempts to ‘unlock the land values’ (Rolnik, 2013: 1063), thus creating new frontiers for dispossession and profit, the settler colonial regime is premised on no ‘end of frontier’ rationale.

In discussing the unbounded territoriality as a challenge to settler-colonial regimes with reference to the West-Bank, Hughes (2020) argues: “the ‘temporary permanence’ of the occupation of the West Bank results from an unclosed frontier” (Hughes, 2020: 229). The case of Wadi Al-Salib, I argue, illustrates how neoliberal means and discourse, through the private sector enable the ‘re-frontiering’ of already dispossessed spaces. The forces acting in the re-frontiered spaces, unlike in the West-Bank are not military personnel, security companies and zealots but investors, architects and real-estate companies. Thus, Israel has been working on multiple frontiers, each with its particular rules, discourse, actors and ‘aesthetics of violence’ (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2016), rendering the violence used against the natives visible in different forms, rhythms and levels.

In the last two decades considerable research has unveiled the continuity of the natives’ elimination under neoliberalism. For example, in Canada and Australia the research has shown how urban renewal, gentrification and new ‘performances’ land and property ownership become an additional means to displace the indigenous peoples (Blatman-Thomas and Porter, 2019; Blomley, 2004; Coulthard, 2014). The case of Wadi Al-Salib, contributes to this literature by illustrating how the elimination is done by the ‘preservation’ of natives’ properties and the production of ‘new’ colonial imagination and re-frontiering.

Conclusion

Contemplating developments in the colonial imaginary landscape, it appears that the neoliberal policies of privatization not only attempted to ‘unlock the land values’ (Rolnik, 2013: 1063) of places like Wadi Al-Salib but also to generate a different meaning of its landscape, one that does not evoke the colonial violence from the past the way Palestinian ruins usually do, but rather an ‘aesthetic violence’ for the natives (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2016). Hence, unlike previous production of colonial landscapes as in Old Jaffa and Ein Hod, the production of new landscapes in Israel/Palestine is privatized, turning it into a collage of distinct colonial landscape images, different hyper-realities in the same place. Arguably, this reflects a novel stage in the settler’s paradoxical project of appropriating and eliminating the native, in which through the landscapes’ performance in the neoliberal era, an attempt is made to canonize and institutionalize the settlers’ imagination and geographical memory. Hence, the colonial ‘frontier’ is re-visited and re-used to be transformed into the new mode of accumulation as the essence of the colonial poetics of space and time.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Yara Sa’di-Ibraheem is a Ph.D. student in the department of Geography and Human Environment at Tel-Aviv University. Her fields of research include: indigenous geographies, settler colonialism, neoliberal urbanism, spatial- temporal experiences.

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